MONTREAL - These two Ryans, the veteran Smyth and the rookie Nugent-Hopkins, were installed side-by-side in the Edmonton Oilers’ Bell Centre dressing room Monday, for reasons known only to the team’s training staff.

But this was no mystery: the shoulder pads that hung behind Smyth – threadbare and tattered and mangled and modified with padding and straps new and old (the equipment, not the player) – are within months of being as old as the youngster who sat beside them.

Ryan Smyth is back with the Oilers this season, which is where he should be. The better story is that headed into Tuesday’s game against the Canadiens, he and Nugent-Hopkins share the team scoring lead, both with six goals and a half-dozen assists through 13 games.

Smyth is in his 17th NHL season, 18 regular-season games shy of No. 1,100. He returned to Edmonton last June, traded from Los Angeles at his request to finish up his career in the city where he began, bringing with him the ratty shoulder pads he’s worn in every game.

If he’s in his twilight years, maybe someone should tell him. On the exciting Oilers, its roster averaging 26.8 years, Smyth has discovered a fountain of youth.

“I feel healthy being around these guys,” he said after practice. “Their energy rubs off. Hopefully my experience can rub off on them. Let’s just make it a two-way street. I’m enjoying myself, trying to win hockey games.”

The Oilers have won eight times against three regulation losses and two by shootout. As the NHL’s 30th-ranked team the past two seasons – that’s dead last – they’re one of this young season’s most compelling stories.

Nugent-Hopkins was the NHL’s No. 1 overall draft pick last June, chosen by the Oilers two days before Smyth would return to the club that had drafted him sixth overall in 1994.

Nugent-Hopkins probably wasn’t paying attention that draft day 17 years earlier, given that he was 14 months old when Smyth’s name was called at the Hartford Civic Centre.

Edmonton, a town that labelled itself City of Champions in the 1980s for its mighty Oilers and football Eskimos, today is in love with its hockey team once more. And atop the list of reasons is the performance of beloved Banff-native Smyth, 36 come February, and Nugent-Hopkins of Burnaby, B.C., age 18½.

Smyth probably was destined to be an Oiler from the day he was run over as a teen by future Hall of Famer Glenn Anderson’s car.

The legend has grown through the decades; some will have you believe he was struck at 100 km/h while shooing a wayward moose off the Trans-Canada Highway in the foothills of the Rockies.

The truth:

“I was going to be Glenn’s caddy at a golf tournament, I bent down in the hotel parking lot to tie up a shoe and he backed over my ankle,” Smyth said through his cockeyed grin.

He was hospitalized, not really worse for wear, and says his mother probably still has the shirt “with a big tire mark on its back.”

The Oilers’ second pick in the 1994 draft, Smyth debuted with the Oilers for three games in ’94-95 before catching on at age 19 the next season. He wasn’t valued for his silky hands as much as his sandpaper game, every scouting report hailing his “reckless abandon.”

(To this day, Smyth regrets never having played at the Montreal Forum, his first game here coming one week after the opening of the Molson Centre. But he’ll quickly tell you that his older brother, Kevin, was drafted by the Hartford Whalers at the Forum in 1992, chosen 79th overall.) For 10½ rugged seasons, Smyth played into the hearts of Oilers fans, a forward who wrung out every drop of his talent.

“I like to do things behind the net,” he said on draft day. “I call it my office, like Wayne (Gretzky) does.”

If Oilers head coach Tom Renney won’t draw too many parallels between the Great One and the Gritty One, he does see the huge value of the veteran in his lineup.

“Ryan plays the same way every night, meat and potatoes. He’s proud of that and he should be,” Renney said. “We’re grateful that we’ve got that. You have to win games in different ways, and it forces others to man up if they see Smitty doing that night after night.

“First and foremost, he wanted to be an Oiler. He’s not wanted to be anything but that. It’s good fortune for us and for him that he can join our organization again at a young enough age when he can step in and really contribute both on and off the ice, as a player with the passion he brings but also as a leader, with his experience and wisdom.”

Failed contract negotiations in 2007 had sent Smyth to the New York Islanders. It was more than a body blow to a man who bled 10W40; it stuck a crowbar into the chest of Edmonton fans.

Not since Gretzky’s trade to Los Angeles nearly two decades earlier had an “untouchable” Oiler been so dispatched. And no matter that Smyth would score 90 goals over 299 games with the Islanders, Colorado and the Kings, the 4½ seasons he spent away from Edmonton were almost a hockey purgatory.

But now he’s back on a fun, skilled team, saying he missed Edmonton’s snow and cold, as old-school a player as they come with his ancient shoulder pads and thick wooden stick blade jammed into a modern composite shaft.

Smyth has no contract beyond this year, saying “it’s one game at a time, things to be assessed later on.”

He’s outlived a handful of NHL arenas and outlasted dozens of teammates. And he continues to love this ride.

“I’ve always said it’s an honour and a privilege to play in this league,” Smyth said. “You have to take full advantage of every opportunity, and you learn a great deal on the journey.”

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